‘The Magic Turns on the Magician’: Trump and the law of Unintended Consequences

“FOOLISH are those who indulge in foolish actionsFoolish are those unconscious of their festering wordsAnd doubly foolish are those with even more foolish reactions”

These words, penned by an unknown poet, succinctly capture the notion of unintended consequences, something that in our troubled day and age enjoys painful currency. In the social sciences, unintended consequences are defined as outcomes that are not the ones always foreseen, or intended, by an action.

The term was popularised in the 20th century by American sociologist, Robert K. Merton, who passed away in the 1960s. One can only imagine what his response would be to US President Trump, and the unintended consequences of his words and deeds, were he alive today.

Blinded by his vision for a re-invented – largely white America at the expense of its founding principles – Trump has energized the world for all the wrong reasons. From his bizarre trade tariff proposals to pay for Mexico’s wall, to his sexism and to his denigration of racial minorities, he has taken the fear out of bigotry.

From the war-torn streets of Aleppo to green card holders, he has raised the ugly flag of Islamophobia. He has deliberately profiled the global Muslim community by issuing a hold on immigration, by blocking Syrian refugees and by targeting seven Muslim-majority countries.

Trump, an unapologetic narcissist, has falsely informed himself of the notion that refugees – especially Muslims – harbor a sociopathic hatred for everything around them and that they are, somehow, a threat to the US. During his campaign Trump even mooted the idea of a “Muslim register”, evoking bitter memories of World War II when over 100, 000 US Japanese citizens were interred.

The absurdity of Trump’s worldview – which has at the stroke of a pen destroyed and devastated the lives of thousands of US green card holders – has been revealed by the Cato Institute, whose research has shown that in the past 40 years only three deaths in the US have been attributed to refugees. In other words, a US citizen in 2017 will have a one in 3.6 billion chance of being attacked by the foreigners the president so fears.

If that’s not enough, last year 23 people died at the hands of infants playing with guns – twenty-three more than those who died in the US at the hands of Muslim “terrorists”. In fact, it was discovered that Americans were more likely to be killed by home-grown fanatics, errant lawnmowers, angry cows, boiling water, rabid dogs and vending machines.

If that’s not enough, in this post-truth era, Trump’s aides have had the temerity to defend something called an “alternative fact”, which to any sane person is an untruth. YouTube has provided some entertaining material, although after the inevitable chuckles, the feeling becomes one of foreboding – more after the sinister fashion of George Orwell’s novel, 1984, than political slapstick.

Fortunately, there are still good people in the world. And judging by the protest and the dissent, the 45th US president has not had things entirely his own way. Whilst tit-for-tat is not the wisest course, it is significant that Iraq – the country that has suffered the worst from terror – has threatened to place a travel embargo on the US.

It doesn’t take rocket science to understand the unintended consequences in the Middle East. For the already embattled Palestinian population it will mean the ultimate affront of an American embassy on occupied soil in East Jerusalem, as well as the prospect of Jewish extremists being emboldened to seize even more of the West Bank.

And as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hunkers down in Mosul to make ISIS’s last territorial stand, he will be able to tell gullible extremists, “I told you so.” And as Al-Qaeda forces reload their weapons in Yemen and send out the suicide bombers, they will also say, “I told you so.”

The political hypocrisy that Saudi Arabia – the country of origin of nineteen 911 hijackers – has been exempted from the Islamaphobic bans is not unnoticed. Iraqi ambassadors have told me that the impending military defeat of ISIS will be nullified by the diplomatic sloppiness of Trump. They say he will not contain terrorism, but fuel it. The esteemed Brookings Institute concurs with much of this view.

Another unintended consequence of Trumpism will emerge from the infamous Mexican wall, something supported by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, facing his own problems due to corruption, has enjoyed the diversion.

Trump’s Mexican xenophobia might well be partly informed by a lucrative cross-border drug trade run by para-military thugs, but it is a double-edged sword. Should Mexico refuse to co-operate on narcotic policing, California and Texas could soon be drowning in cocaine.

The other issue is humanitarian. The Atlantic reported on University of Arizona findings which showed increased policing resulted in more migrants dying while trying to cross the border. Significantly, there was no uptick in the amounts of people trying to enter the US, whether there was more policing or not.

If he ever does lay the foundations for his infamous Mexico wall, it is a given that Trump will waste billions of dollars’ worth of concrete and razor wire. He will, say migration experts, compound crime by encouraging syndicates to traffic migrants via other, more dangerous routes. As Marc Pierini, the former European Union ambassador to Turkey and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, told The Atlantic:

“A wall can slow someone down. It can compel them to change the route they take. But when people want to cross, whatever the motivation is, they will find a way to cross.”

The well-known Palestinian author and journalist, Ramzy Baroud, posted on his Facebook page that Trump represented a fierce, unprecedented battle between normal people and the American elites and their corporate interests.

These men had “hoodwinked” ordinary Americans to support war, to hate Muslims, Mexicans and migrants. They had brainwashed the voter to blame the poor for his misfortune, to objectify and oppress women, to support government misdeeds and wars “in the name of human rights, freedom and democracy.”

Quoting an Arabic proverb, Baroud concluded by saying that with Trump the magic had turned upon the magician, and that by the time the smoke settled, the US would find itself facing a changed and likely irreversible political reality.

– Shafiq Morton is a journalist and a presenter at Voice of the Cape radio station. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

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